United States or Palestine ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The aspect of these cliffs is so wild and horrid, that it is impossible to behold them without terror. The spectator is apt to imagine that nature had formerly suffered some violent convulsion, and that these are the dismembered remains of the dreadful shock: the ruins, not of Persepolis or Palmyra, but of the world!
Whether, by their settled and avowed scorn of thoughtless talkers, the Persians were able to diffuse to any great extent, the virtue of taciturnity, we are hindered by the distress of those times from being able to discover, there being very few memoirs remaining of the court of Persepolis, nor any distinct accounts handed down to us of their office-clerks, their ladies of the bed-chamber, their attornies, their chamber-maids, or the foot-men.
Persepolis, indeed, was gone, and only its vast and pillared ruins remained in the wilderness; but near by the town of Istakhr had grown up, to be what Persepolis had been in the old Achaemenian days, the heart and center of Fars, which is spiritually, the heart and center of all Iran.
The only really historical inscription at Persepolis is one set up by Darius. He was the only Persian king, except perhaps one, who placed an inscription upon his tomb. The later monarchs in their records do little more than repeat certain religious phrases and certain forms of self-glorification which occur in the least remarkable inscriptions of their great predecessor.
In the inscription of the Nakhtshe Rustam, near Persepolis, which we saw when in Persia in 1889, thirty countries are named which were conquered by Darius, the Akhemenid, amongst them Iskuduru, i.e. Sokotra. Though it is Arabian politically, Sokotra geographically is African.
The treasure found at Susa was even greater than that which Babylon furnished—about fifty thousand talents, or fifty million dollars, one-fifth of which, three years before, would have been sufficient to subsidize Greece, and present a barrier to the conquests of both Philip and Alexander. He then marched into Persia proper, subdued the inhabitants, and entered Persepolis.
He thus visited in the first place Persepolis, Shiraz, Ormuz upon the Persian Gulf, where he was extremely ill, and whence he embarked in 1688 for the East Indies. Arabia Felix, India, the Malabar Coast, Ceylon, Java, Sumatra, and Japan were afterwards all visited by him. The object of these journeys was exclusively scientific.
Among the birds, peacocks, parrots, and partridges have been recognized; among the beasts, besides lions and wild boars, buffaloes, panthers, lynxes, and gazelles. In another panel a winged lion, the "lineal descendant of those found at Nineveh and Persepolis," reflects the mythological symbolism of Assyria, and shows how tenacious was its hold on the West-Asian mind.
The spectator, who knows that he saw the first act at Alexandria, cannot suppose that he sees the next at Rome, at a distance to which not the dragons of Medea could, in so short a time, have transported him; he knows with certainty that he has not changed his place, and he knows that place cannot change itself; that what was a house cannot become a plain; that what was Thebes can never be Persepolis.
It is, however, at Persepolis, the real capital of the later Persian kings, whose grandeur and wealth were such that Alexander is said to have found there treasure to the amount of thirty millions of pounds sterling, that we find the most magnificent series of ruins.
Word Of The Day